“You’re a monster,” a clammy-faced Morales said to Rick, as he baldly explained the overarching theme and the title of another crash-bang-wallop episode. Yet, while far from perfect, Monsters did offer a welcome change of pace from the frenetic ammo-dumping of the previous two outings. (Someone finally – finally – ran out of bullets.) The possibility of Ezekiel’s demise was dangled before us, for another. Monsters also benefited from the continued absence of Negan, the Foghorn Leghorn of leather-jacketed villains. Yet the episode’s strengths – and there were a few – lay in its quieter, emotional moments. There were even a couple of attempts at comedy. Season seven this definitely ain’t.

The Walking Dead: season eight, episode two recap – The Damned

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The episode washed its hands of the quasi-cliffhanger of Morales rather quickly. Whether you consider his death to be a letdown – bitterly anticlimactic after the groundwork laid by he and Rick’s verbal sparring – is down to personal preference. Personally, I thought it was a pleasantly unexpected rug-pull. All the signs were there that Morales’s redemption and reintroduction into Rick’s embrace would be a long, drawn-out process spread across a season of tears, pouting and soul-searching. His almost incidental murder was akin to Denise’s in season six – short, sharp and pointless, just as deaths in this show should be. It obviously lacked the heft it would have had if the character was more established, but it jolted a sense of unpredictability into an hour with few other narrative surprises to speak of.

Chief among the general lack of shocks was Eric’s death. This doesn’t mean it was poorly handled, though. His bucket-kicking was inevitable, but his final scene with Aaron was wonderfully played. Both men knew how this conversation ended, the lies they told fooling neither of them, instead merely acting as placeholders for the words they both wanted to say but couldn’t bring themselves to utter. Though, bullets in the stomach in this show do seem to be little more than flesh wounds until the plot demands that they aren’t. Rick received a similar ping in last season’s finale and barely reacted. Eric’s had an exit wound and everything. Yet the moment Aaron came back to the vacant tree, still clinging to hope by his fingernails, was heartbreaking. Eric wasn’t a main player exactly – he’s no Glenn or Andrea – but his zombiefied shamble towards his new zombie friends was a mighty kick right in the feel-glands. Will Zombie Eric return? I hope so. I miss him.

Morales’s short-lived reintroduction did provide a jumping-off point for comparisons between his decline into badness and Rick’s – and by extension those of all the other so-called Good Guys circling the drain of moral vacuity. These character examinations varied wildly in their effectiveness: Daryl’s calm and pragmatic executions of both Morales and the unfortunate Savior near the episode’s end shocked even Rick, a man who’d brutally slain a man using a piece of shelving mere minutes before. We’ve watched over seven seasons as Daryl’s gone from stone-cold hick to the beating heart of the show. Now to see him so devoid of humanity was both effective, understandable and unsettling. Daryl, and therefore the viewers, have become so desensitised to killing that it barely registers any more. The show is at its best when it’s prodding at points like this, and Rick and Daryl’s scenes continue to be this season’s best.

Aaaaaand then we come to Morgan. Stupid, stick-waggling Morgan. Having reservations about taking prisoners: fine. Craving cold-blooded revenge on the Saviors: sure. Shooting one as they tried to escape: hey, it’s a free country, go nuts. You earned it. But having a bizarre fight in the woods with Jesus because you’ve got a bee in your bonnet? Oh, come on, grow up, man. If the audience needed to be reminded of Jesus’s inexplicable adeptness at kung fu then there were surely more elegant ways to go about it. Jesus turning to camera and saying, “Audience, I am inexplicably adept at kung fu” would have been less jarring. If this handbags-at-dawn scuffle genuinely occurred as a symptom of Morgan’s moral malaise then it was ill-judged in the extreme. It was like watching one of the moodier episodes of Power Rangers. “I’m not right,” said Morgan, while frowning near some bushes. “It doesn’t mean I’m wrong.” Yes it does, Morgan. So don’t do it again. (These scenes did at least answer the burning question of what zombies look like when they’re having the time of their lives rolling down a grassy hill. The answer is: majestic.)

Jesus’s conscience is the only one firing on all cylinders at the moment, and using the Hilltop community as an ersatz PoW camp is definitely – and possibly literally – going to come back and bite him in the bum. Maggie, too, is unwilling to relinquish her humanity just yet, first allowing Gregory – a man more deliciously weaselly than Ron Weasley’s weasel – back into the encampment, then siding with Jesus about what to do with the captive Saviors. With Rick’s values now apparently reignited by Daryl’s casual death-dealing, the three of them seem ripe for some tough lessons further down the line. We’ve seen Rick go back and forth enough times, and Maggie went through the wringer last season, so it’s the implacable Jesus that presents the most intriguing proposition for a descent into murdery madness.

The show needs moralistic centrepoints like these to anchor it, particularly with everyone else seemingly on a mindless killing spree. For all his faults, Ezekiel is another who still knows the difference between right and wrong. After an exciting opening in which he, Carol and the Kingdomers duped a gang of Saviors into a trap, the episode was intercut with a montage-like series of ambushes, because they remembered a thing called “strategy” exists. By Monsters’ end, they were brought to heel by a sniper, and now the King (it looked like some damn fool dived on him, protecting him from the hail of gunfire, so he’ll be fine) is the one whose saintliness will be tested. If he abandons his infuriating Shakespearean patter while he’s at it, then the show will be all the better for it.

Much more of a bridging episode than last week’s The Damned, Monsters nevertheless continued to be cause for cautious optimism as we head into the armpit of season eight. The persistent niggles remain – Ezekiel, stupid characters doing even more stupid things, plot-necessitated lapses in logic – but it threw dashes of the moral ambiguity of old Walking Dead back into this new, action-heavy mix. Negan will surely reappear soon. Simon, his right-hand man and a far more interesting antagonist, likewise. Rick’s taking Polaroids of dead Saviors presumably to goad Negan into showing himself. And two trailers full of future-zombies are now mere metres away from Hilltop. Things are thoroughly afoot.

In several past seasons, episode four consisted largely of nothing happening for a very long and boring period indeed. As we head into episode four of season eight, things, as the kids say, look set to go down. It’s a refreshing change.